


there should just be one safe place in the world

by buckstiel



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Complicated Relationships, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Loyalty, Missing Scene, Pining, References to Bloodline, References to Leia: Princess of Alderaan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-03-05 23:04:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13398156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: The first time Amilyn kisses Leia, it's entirely on accident.Five times Amilyn kisses Leia and one time Leia kisses her first.





	there should just be one safe place in the world

**Author's Note:**

> i wanted to write leia/holdo and realized that i ought to read leia: princess of alderaan first. so i did. and then promptly spiraled out of control. so here we are.
> 
> title from "road music" by richard siken.
> 
> many thanks to quidnunc-life, as always. :*

**1.**

The first time Amilyn kisses Leia, it’s entirely on accident.

It takes Leia almost an hour to extract herself from the endless parade of local dignitaries and visiting senators at the reception following her investiture ceremony. Each of them has their congratulations to offer, grins pressing the wizened lines on their faces into sharper relief--this Leia understands, the formalities tied up in her position.

But the past weeks have been long and the relief upon reaching this milestone thick and warm, and she desperately wants to investigate the tray of tarts where Amilyn has taken to hovering. Mon Mothma senses the antsiness and draws Senator Palmo away from the topic at hand, allowing her to escape with little more recognition than the slightest nod of her head; and when she reaches Amilyn, she cannot pull her attention away from the tart she’s selected. 

Of course, she’s used to it by now--fluent in Holdo, as she’s told herself before--but she still watches carefully as Amilyn inspects the pastry at close range, a few specks of glitter from her blue hair dotting the fruit center. “Exactly what are you…”

“Starblossom,” Leia says, and before she can say anything further, the tart falls to the table. Amilyn’s hands brace against her jawline like she’s holding a precious piece of art in her palms, beaming, and she presses a kiss to Leia’s forehead. 

“I am so happy for you--oh,” she says. “That was probably too forward--it’s custom on Gatalenta and I was swept up in the moment. The energy here… it’s buoyant with light.” 

“You don’t have to be sorry--” 

“I wasn’t apologizing, merely explaining. I really hadn’t expected myself to do that, but if we cannot surprise ourselves, what fun is that?” 

Leia doesn’t have an answer to her question, nor does she think Amilyn is expecting one. They smile at each other, breaking out into the most diplomatic giggling they can muster while collecting a small handful of tarts to take to the far corner, away--just for a few hours--from the hushed murmurs dancing around the coming rebellion.

In the corner, Amilyn finds she quite likes starblossom, and Leia thinks to herself how much that suits her, a name tying together the galaxy and the earth under her feet.

* * *

**2.**

Leia doesn’t see Amilyn for many years. Their time in the Apprentice Legislature ends, as all things must, and it’s not so much the distance between Alderaan and Gatalenta that keeps them apart, but the lack of time to traverse it. The rebellion absorbs more and more of Leia’s waking hours, burrowing itself into her continued humanitarian missions and taking her to far-flung places like Dantooine, Lothal, and a moon of Yavin. 

The rebellion absorbs her time until that no longer satisfies it, and then it takes everything. 

She speaks to Amilyn once on a staticky, blipping holo from the bunker on Hoth months before they’re run out by AT-AT fire--Gatalenta can’t officially send supplies, but Amilyn is more than able to finesse a shipment through her personal estate and outside suspicion. As they sign off, the signal breaks up, and any part of Amilyn’s message that’s decipherable is overtaken by Luke and Wedge arguing in the hallway.

A holomessage arrives for her amid the celebrations on Endor. The text of it wanders and doubles back, halfway tripping over metaphors and far too many exclamation points before inviting her to Gatalenta--but the war isn’t over, and already Han is planning the Pathfinders mission for the next morning out loud and into his grog.

It takes her weeks to write back--not because she forgets, but because every time she sits down to compose the message, more is erased than is ever added. On more than one occasion she finishes with less than she starts with, and by the time she finally pushes it through the holonet, half of her ramblings are an apology Amilyn won’t accept.

“Because it isn’t needed,” she writes back the following morning. “Come when you can, or I will. And may the Force bless your marriage with all the light of the stars.”

Years pass in the blink of an eye and only shudder back to its regular pace when a splintered smoldering star destroyer pierces the Jakku desert and a baby is in her arms. Ben squirms no matter who holds him, nose wrinkling as the pudgy rolls of his arms wave over his head.

Amilyn peers over her shoulder at him, throwing one of her airy grins to Han standing uncomfortably in the corner of the room. She’s here, in the flesh with Crait-red hair and not a flickering holo, because the war is over and the galaxy can start learning how to give things again.

A brother. A son. A friend, settling back into the space beside her that she carved out for herself.

“I see your father in him,” she says, offering Ben a finger. He reluctantly pokes at it.

Leia hesitates, an invisible hand clasping around her throat. “You know I’m adopted.”

“Ben absorbs from you as you did from Bail,” she says. “See, it’s here. In the eyes.” Her finger moves away from Ben’s tiny fists, traces the curve of his iris. “All of these browns are heavy with the same sense of purpose.”

The pressure on her throat eases, and Amilyn must sense it--or maybe tension seated in her shoulders collapsed all at once--because a warm pressure melts into her temple, a soft and tender thing that swoops into her stomach.

If she squints, reaches out from the part of her heart carved out special for Bail and Breha, she can start to see it too.

Amilyn can only stay so long--matters of the New Republic push urgently into all of their schedules--and after the door slides shut behind her, Han frowns after it. When the door doesn’t answer him, he turns to Leia.

“You got a lot of friends like that?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know…” he says, waving his hand in the air. “Weird...and uh...y’know. Touchy-feely.”

She would have to let the low-hanging fruit pass just this once. “There aren’t a lot of people like Amilyn Holdo in the galaxy, much less that are friends of mine.”

* * *

 

 **3.**  

If something other than time happens to Amilyn in the years that follow, it’s never shared--little by little the course of their lives wears away at their youth, hard to notice until she lines up a memory of Amilyn from their days in the Apprentice Legislature with the one sitting across the café table from her or helping Mon wrangle all the younglings at Ben’s fifth birthday party. Her hair remains vibrant, though on a less-frequent dying cycle, but being fluent in Holdo has become close to unnecessary--she holds a conversation with Han with one of Ben’s Nautolan friends latched onto her back, and not once does Han seek Leia out from across the room in desperate need of assistance.

Not once.

Even Lando remarks on it between bites of cake. “He likes her well enough, yeah,” he says. A glob of icing catches itself in his mustache. “Just from a distance.”

But Amilyn is still Amilyn even if she speaks more directly, even if some of her smile lines aren’t creasing as deeply as Leia would have expected. She drops by Leia’s Senate office on Chandrila whenever she’s on-planet, and each time it feels like she’s stepped further away from the girl in the mountains looking for snow owls during a crisis.

She says this as if she hasn’t made those steps herself, as if she’d insult the odor of her captors again if, stars forbid, that comes to pass.

Amilyn is away from Chandrila during the Napkin Bombing, is still away when the tight fist Leia keeps around the identity of her birth father is pried open for the whole galaxy to gawk and jeer at. A few days after officially submitting her leave of absence from the Senate and one day after she cobbles together a handful of others to her cause, a disheveled mop of deep indigo curls nearly runs into her on the street corner.

“Leia!” Amilyn’s thin fingers grasp at her shoulders, giving her a desperate once-over before pulling her into a hug. It’s the sort of display of affection Leia’s relegated to the past, to the rush of feelings unbridled by childhood or a burst of hope in war. Still she wraps her arms around Amilyn’s frame only after a moment of hesitation, and then she doesn’t want to let go. It’s warm here. It’s something she hasn’t known she’s needed with Han away, with Luke and Ben even further.

“It’s awful, simply awful,” Amilyn says into Leia’s hair, careful not to muss the braids.

“Yeah, I wish he wasn’t my father too.”

Amilyn pulls back. “No,” she says. Her eyes narrow, confused. “I mean what they’ve done to you for it. All that good you’ve done wiped out for something that doesn’t even matter anymore.”

“But they care how it looks, so…” Leia sighs.

“No wonder I don’t understand.”

Leia’s let her gaze drift toward the sidewalk, but Amilyn catches it before it falls completely, grinning, holding her joke there between her teeth until she sees it mirrored. The hold between their eyes is just as warm as the embrace moments ago, and silent, too, until it’s broken.

“Karking traitor,” a Senator from Corulag spits under their breath as they pass.

Amilyn stands to her full towering height, staring down the back of the Senator’s head until the focused heat of it focuses them to turn--and they do, because they always do when they feel that push at their skull--when Amilyn offers them a scathing version of her old lopsided grin before pressing a peck to the corner of Leia’s eye.

The Senator glowers but says nothing, continues on their way.

“You’ll call on me if you need me, right?” Amilyn says once they’re gone. “There aren’t whispers of what you’re planning, but I do know you.”

Leia smiles, only a flicker of it. “I hope I won’t need to.”

The caveat-- _we’ve said that before, though, haven’t we?_ \--hangs in the air, seeps into their lungs unspoken.

* * *

 

**4.**

The day they receive news of a Jedi Academy in ruins, Luke and Ben scattered to the winds, a massive monsoon was slated to hit the base on D’Qar. The days before, every spare maintenance worker or pilot not on duty spent extra hours lugging sandbags around the entrances and reapplying caulk along the weaker parts of the ceiling only to find themselves squinting into the brightest sun they’ve faced all season. By sundown, the maintenance crew liked to say, this kind of sun can fade X-wing paint three shades.

The news comes before midday, so she doesn’t get the chance to see if that’s true.

At first, she can’t tell anything is wrong. The receiving station bleeps to an empty chair while Tabala is off in the ‘fresher, but Joph must catch a glance of it on his way through to the hangar. He stops, grabs Commander D’Acy as she passes, and then she has that same frozen look to her.

At first, she shrugs it off. They walk as quickly as they can from the room without running, and Leia knows--thinks she knows--that if it were truly anything serious, they would have told her immediately.

It’s Ackbar who tells her. He’s the only one they trust to know how to be delicate with it, and when he sits next to her at the table in the briefing room she’s taken for a desk, looks at her with his big yellow eyes, it hits her all at once before he even says a work. The Force was raging toward her from across the galaxy and she put up a dam, and now with her hands dwarfed under Ackbar’s thick palm, it breaks. Shatters. She can’t breathe from the pain but she can’t show it either, not now, not before Joph and Greer lead that scouting mission to Ryndellia when she has to tell them about the TIE fighter sightings around Naboo.

She can’t let herself go the way of the dam. There’s never time.

She thanks Ackbar for telling her, turns back to her datapad, and one blink later Major Ematt’s disembodied voice is saying he’ll lead the briefing, and someone leaves a large cup of caf at her side. She blinks again, and did anyone tell Han? Who’s told Han?

Ackbar’s voice this time, back again-- _the message was originally from Han, Luke never knew the base location, he told Han before he…_

The blinking screen of the datapad is in front of her, there yet not there. Her brother is gone. Her son has blood seeping into his hands and drying under his fingernails, and maybe the Senate was right not to trust her. Were they right?

Where’s Han?

She blinks again and the briefing room refocuses again, clearer and more grounded in the now. Ackbar’s still sitting beside her.

 _There was another part of the message_ , he says.

 _He says he’s sorry_ , he says.

She doesn’t hear what else he says but she knows it, still. Her brother is gone. Her son is gone. Her husband is gone.

The three statements repeat in her head, and she sits with it, wants to stew in it until it’s more fact than feeling. Just like Alderaan, just like lying in her cell on the Death Star and thinking of the home that wasn’t there anymore. But she’s not as young as she was and the effort is herculean, so before long she blinks again.

This time she clears her vision and Amilyn is sitting across from her, eyes puffy from crying and hair as green as they day they first met. They stay there together like that for who knows how long, but time finally stops skittering forward whenever Leia blinks. Amilyn moves beside her, wraps an arm around her shoulder and pulls her close, peppering a line of barely-there kisses from the top of her head to her temple. 

Amilyn murmurs into her hair so quietly no one else in the room could possibly hear them--“Come back, come back to me.” She squeezes at her shoulder, offers her free hand for Leia to latch onto, and she presses it between her palms. “We’ve still got work to do.”

And the “we,” she means it. Leia’s fellow officers never doubt her abilities but they know a terrible piece of news when they see it after receiving so many themselves. Joph, from Gatalenta himself, made the call. “Of course I came straight away,” she says as they take a walk around the tarmac that evening. “You remember what I told you on Chandrila.”

The green of her hair melts into the treeline before her as she stares up at the stars nudging themselves into place, orienting herself by those astrology charts of old, and the pain in Leia’s gut softens. Only by a degree, but it softens all the same.

* * *

 

**5.**

The Resistance rewards Amilyn’s newly-achieved rank of Vice Admiral in the only way it knows how--with a battle, with Black Squadron deployed on another mission, with chunks of debris wearing down the Ninka’s shields.

The briefing room thrives when it flips itself on its head, turns itself into the situation room on the power of shouted orders alone. Kaydel and Statura yell over each other through the same comlink to the pilot of the cruiser, and that entire conversation bleeds through into Leia’s own, where Amilyn raises her voice only to ensure she can still be heard.

“Vice Admiral,” Leia says. “Repeat again, Statura just cursed so loudly his parents could hear him all the way on Garel.”

“We ran into First Order TIEs after dropping out of hyperspace at Socorro, and we don’t have enough crew to evade them _and_ make calculations for a jump back to base.” Not one drop of fear leaks into her even tone, as if she’s forgotten the cruiser was headed to Socorro to repair the majority of its weaponry. “These asteroids might make for good cover, but the Ninka isn’t Black One, General.”

“You’re telling me…” she sighs, and she can sense Amilyn’s smirk through the comms. “Wait--asteroids? Around Socorro?”

Commander D’Acy and Major Brance exchange concerned glances. “The Chyron Belt…” D’Acy says. “Last I heard a few months ago it had moved past Rodia and Tatooine--I didn’t know it was headed in that direction--”

“Of all the things in this gods-forsaken galaxy--Vice Admiral,” she says back in the comms. “Those aren’t just asteroids. It’s the Chyron Belt.”

“Oh,” Amilyn says, and she almost sounds cheerful. “Everyone’s favorite rogue band of rocks. That does change things.”

Calling that an understatement would be an understatement in itself. Long content in whirling around the emptier spaces between the Core and Western Reaches, the Chyron Belt turned toward the more populated areas of the Outer Rim just after the first war and ravaged any ships caught in its path. Worse yet, no one know what caused it, so no one knew how to avoid it.

(“Could be...the Force?” Luke offered tepidly at the readouts in the old Chandrila apartment. “It’s probably the Force if it’s from the Western Reaches.”

Han made a face. “You spend so long telling me the Force is more than just moving rocks only now to tell me...what, the Force is responsible for this bunch of moving rocks specifically? Sure.”)

“Get out of there, Vice Admiral. That’s an order.”

“Understood, but with all due respect, General, that’s easier said than done.”

Statura and Kaydel’s yelling fall to a normal level--finally--leaving the pilot undoubtedly sweating with Amilyn hovering behind her in the cockpit without that extra strain. Leia already has her own hovering entourage of pilots and maintenance crew, the less bold of the bunch gathering in the doorway to the room instead.

Of course it’s Bastian and Starck who push their way to the front. “We were talking with Tallie,” Bastian starts, out of breath, “and she studied this theoretical stuff at the Academy, and--”

“Long story short, she knows how to maneuver through it and get them out,” Starck says.

“Why didn’t you bring her here to tell me herself?” Leia says. “Go get her!”

They run out of the room, knocking Threepio off balance and into Nien Nunb in their hurry, and Leia turns back to the radar screen. The pain in her gut has eased its sharpness since the fate of the Jedi Academy dropped onto her shoulders, but at times like these it turns over slowly, digs its fingers down into her until the pain burns more than it throbs. Watching the dashboard signal lights of downed ships flick off could hardly be the easiest part of this position, but Amilyn being aboard makes it worse.

She shouldn’t think like that, and she knows it. What about the rest of the crew, the rest of Cobalt and Crimson Squadrons waiting to rendezvous with them and supply the rest of the bombers with their own much-needed ammunition? That’s half of the manpower of the Resistance. It can’t be about one woman, not for a general.

And yet.

Tallie runs into the room and skids to a halt at her side. “I hear there’s a situation with the Chyron Belt, General Organa?” she says breathlessly.

“Yes, Lintra, hold on.” She clicks her comms off mute. “Vice Admiral, I have Blue Leader Tallie Lintra with vital--”

“Thank you very much, General, but we’ve pulled something together.”

Leia ignores Tallie's wide-eyed gaping begging for direction and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Elaborate. Please,” she adds after a moment.

“Two of the defense turrets are back online and our best gunners are clearing us a path--Tico, watch that TIE above your ten o’clock--”

One cruiser against a swarm of TIE fighters and its lurking Star Destroyer against a freak force of nature, and after a tense couple of hours, they come out alive. It’s a kriffing miracle. No one on base has ever heard even a wild cantina story about making it out of the Chyron Belt in one piece on one’s own, much less fending off enemy combatants; and that old relief of a battle won settles into the room, celebration giving way to exhaustion landing square in their laps.

The Ninka redirects to D’Qar for its supply run before meeting up with the rest of its squadrons, and Leia doesn’t go out to meet them, keeping instead to her private office. It’s a quick stop, after all, and the source of the burning in her gut has shifted from pain to anger. Tallie’s knowledge was the safest bet, and Amilyn didn’t listen--but as soon as the anger comes, it ebbs. Her orders applied to a cruiser marooned by its lack of weapons; when they came back online, recalculations were necessary. It’s what she tells herself to keep the flood of it all under her tongue, and she almost doesn’t when Amilyn appears the door.

A dribble of dried blood runs halfway down the side of her face and more splotches of it stain her dress. Fitting, almost, that her hair is back to that vibrant Crait-red--except the calm air about her Leia’s so used to has dissipated, and long before she arrived to her office.

“Amilyn,” Leia says, standing. “Are you all right?”

She takes a slow, shaky breath. “You remember when we met, when we were new friends… how I was so fascinated with facing death and wanted to stare my own mortality in the face?”

How could Leia forget? First impressions leave their mark, but not as much as what fueled them.

“It was pretty close back there.” Amilyn’s long legs don’t need more than a few strides to cross the small office and land her beside Leia. “It’ll probably be pretty close in the near future. I need to head back to the hangar but I don’t want to die without…”

Amilyn’s hands shake as they hold the sides of Leia’s face, shaking harder when she kisses her--on the mouth this time, soft and gentle without being insistent. A statement rather than a plea. Once it falls into place in Leia’s head, Amilyn’s already pulled back and heading back to the Ninka.

She pauses at the door, her usual crooked grin returned as if there was never any reason for it to have left. “I’ve always held that in my heart, I think.”

Leia doesn’t have long to dwell--Black Squadron’s lighting up the comms with developments on the Lor San Tekka issue and D’Acy already sounds far more annoyed than usual with whatever Dameron’s yelling about this time. Leia doesn’t have time to dwell at all, but as soon as the crisis of the hour stops pressing so hard, Amilyn rushes back to the forefront, the kiss replaying over and over in her mind’s eye.

* * *

**+1**

While Leia’s unconscious, she dreams: of feeling returning in a fire to her fingers and toes after the absolute cold of space, of roiling seas beneath a vibrant green island, the glow of pride in her parents’ eyes during her investiture, orange bursts of death below on Scarif’s blue waters. Her dreams reach for Han and Bail and Breha, for a mother she never knew and a father she’d like to forget. Alderaan glows whole before her. Luke is smiling under the glow of the Ewok village torches, and nowhere she drifts can find him with lines on his face but it’s just as well. She likes him like this. Happy.

Her dreams circle to the well-tread paths of her thoughts--of Amilyn, the Ninka trailing in the shadow of the Raddus through space, Amilyn kissing her.

She dreams in maybes and ifs. A still of Amilyn carefully pulling the pins from Leia’s braids. Another of an early morning with stripes of the sunrise falling over Amilyn’s sleeping face beside her. Another with her hands roaming the length of her body, the dip of her collarbone to the curves of her hips.

(The conscious mind always shuffles that one to the bottom of the deck, but here--)

Luke’s old grizzled face appears before her in a flash over the same green island, and she rests assured that he’s alive, that Rey and Chewie are okay.

The dreams are rattled and don’t quite settle after that. Outside of herself, something is wrong. 

And, of course, there is. The credits Leia would pay to see Shara Bey’s face before she stuns Dameron on the bridge.

There’s so little time and Leia can feel it falling through her fingers, onto the floor, sucked away into space with the rest of their dead--but little time isn’t no time, and she changes from her medbay gown as quickly as her state will allow. The cane gets in the way more than it helps, not that she’s surprised.

Amilyn finds her as soon as she leaves the medbay for the hangar. “A bit of a day it’s been,” she says, nervously rolling a strand of hair between her finger and thumb. It’s light purple this time and probably Leia’s favorite that she’s seen. “I’m so glad you’re still here with us.”

“They can’t stop me that easily.” She catches up to where Amilyn stands. “And, for the record… I am also glad that… you’re here with us. You’re probably going to save us all with this, you know.”

Amilyn grins, tight at the corners, but says nothing. Waiting, almost.

“There’s still such a long road ahead, and I’m--” Leia can’t bring herself to say it. She’s _tired_. She is so _tired_ , and it’s never been something she’s felt allowed to vocalize, much less admit to herself.

She is so tired and there is so little she has left to hold in her own two hands.

Leia grabs a fistful of the front of Amilyn’s dress and pulls her down until she closes the distance between them. Her cane clatters to the floor--Amilyn is steady, Amilyn is right here for balance, Amilyn is the one kissing her back like this is the real plan to save the galaxy. Their holds on each other are clingy and desperate, searching constantly for a closer grip, neither of them holds back the small sounds passing between them, and--if Leia lets herself pay attention to something other than the feel of Amilyn under her fingers--one of them is probably crying.

It’s Amilyn. As soon as Leia knows for certain, she pulls away, neatens her vibrant hair in a way that lets her hands wick the tears away from her eyes. “The shuttles are waiting.”

Handing Leia the cane from the floor, she leads the way down to the hangar, and against all odds, Leia lets herself fan her sputtering flame of hope.


End file.
